Ctrl-Alt-Del not working?

[Mynewmoniker]

Hi anyone geeky and kind

What should I do or what's wrong if the good old ctrl-alt-del won't turn my computer off safely?

[ItsYoniYappy]

Oh I got mine free, if you go to start menu and in the search box type in defrag and see if you one comes up, most systems do have one inbuilt into them.

[YoniBottsBumgina]

There's a defragmenter built into Windows. Or if you want a 3rd party one, CCleaner is very good. But yes search box in start menu should find it :)

[YoniBottsBumgina]

Sorry - Defraggler which is made by the same company as CCleaner.

But the one already on your computer is fine.

[YoniBottsBumgina]

You don't necessarily need to do it weekly though. I definitely don't do mine anywhere near as often. An estimate I saw once was when your computer is around 5-6% fragmented then that's a good time to defrag. You can keep an eye on it by looking at the defragment tool thing. I haven't done this laptop since I got it, which was almost a year ago, and it was only at 4%. It depends how much you use the computer and what for :)

[Mynewmoniker]

Just looked and have an auto defrag set up

[Chanatan]

I never defragment,I dont think its necessary on the newer larger hard drives.Are you still having problems?

[Mynewmoniker]

Yes I am Chanatan. It can still take an age and then not shut down or even start up again without request. It links the start up at the end of a shutdown (a bit like a loop effect); it doesn't take it upon itself just to start up.

[YoniBottsBumgina]

But is your computer usually on at the time it auto defrags? Mine was set to 1am or something. It can't do anything if it's switched off!

Defrag is less crucial with bigger hard drives but it can still slow things down.

I'm wondering OP if you have loads of unnecessary things in your startup. How comfortable are you with checking your currently running processes via task manager or checking the startup folder? These are things you can break if you don't know what you're doing but might be worth getting checked.

Also as a final curiosity, click on the start menu, right click on "my computer" and click "properties". Can you tell us how much RAM you have (from that screen)? And which operating system you have (will be windows XP, windows vista or Windows 7 most likely)

[Mynewmoniker]

"The properties for this item are not available" it says

It didn't need defragging it said. 0% frag

Windows 7 home premium.

3.00 GB

As I said before, "There was a lot on the start up menu that I didn't recognise so I didn't want to delete it in case I needed it for my laptop to work."

Thanks again for taking an interest and helping so far...